Back in 1973, America was facing an energy crisis. At the time, it created widespread near panic in the United States as for the first time since WWII, the population felt vulnerable. I was working part time in a little bookshop in the Sierra Mountains at the time and wondered what all the fuss was about. I had pared my life down to the bare essentials and the money I made at the bookshop plus a few dollars here and there made from craft items was more than enough for me to live on.
I kept my mouth shut, but when customers came in and complained about the “crisis” as if the world was coming to an end, I found it annoying. For one thing, I knew the shortage wouldn’t last. For another, the simplest solution was to simply start carpooling or taking public transportation. It might not be pleasant for those who were used to driving anywhere, at any time in their big gas guzzling cars, but a fuel shortage was no reason for wide-spread panic. Vietnam villagers had a reason to panic when our American planes napalmed their forests or helicopters strafed their villages, but panicking because you might have to curb your petrol usage seemed just a little bit silly.
I kept my my shut because I was there to sell books. Luckily, a book arrived that offered solutions to the energy crisis and, had it been listened to, could have prevented the much bigger crisis we face today. That book was Small Is Beautiful, Economics As If People Mattered, by E.F. Schumacher.
Here’s a quote from the book:
Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.
We “hippies” were already aware of that. That’s why we were experimenting with communes and other alternative lifestyles. The general public didn’t catch on, though, until they had to wait in long lines to get a tank of gas.
For awhile, Schumacher’s book was the best seller in the little bookshop where I worked, as it was throughout the English speaking world. In fact, the British Times Literary Supplement ranked it as one of the most influential books of the post WWII era.
The energy crisis was “fixed” by the government and the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam in 1975. Confidence was restored and for the next 30+ years, there was a virtual orgy of consumption. Like Puff the Magic Dragon, those of us who believed in Schumacher’s message, sadly slipped into our caves, only to re-emerge recently in order to say, “We told you so.”
So what is the message of Small Is Beautiful? You’re going to have to read it yourself to find out. Click this link, Small Is Beautiful, and you can read the PDF for free. Unlike the printed version, there are several typos in it, so I think somebody actually typed the entire text out in the hope that people would read and learn from it.
Small Is Beautiful is the kind of book you’re going to want to read slowly in order to digest it all and you will want to underline some of paragraphs for future reference. It’s not really in the public domain, so to be fair to Schumacher, who I assume is still getting royalties for his brilliant book, please just do as I did and use the PDF as you would in a bookshop: read a few pages and then buy it. Click this link Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries
or the image above to buy a copy from Amazon.
